Read these lines: "Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me? No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way of him." What can be inferred?

1. The list runs through friends, beggars, children and then any man or woman at all. 2. Asking the time or the way is the smallest thing a stranger can ask, and even that never happens. 3. So the avoidance reaches past people who know him to people who do not, option B. 4. The fourth choice would fit a famous man, but strangers in the street have no way of knowing who he is. 5. Nothing about deafness or absence appears anywhere in the quoted lines. _Source: Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave I Marley's Ghost_